CHAPTER LX

A Letter in the Night

He kissed her again, quickly, and arose.

“Anyway,” he commented, “I’m glad that I live in the Flying ’40’s, even if I don’t personally belong to ’em.”

“I don’t think you will be,” she warned, “when Mrs. Morely tells you all she’s got laid out—to tell you.” She cuddled down in the pillow, her hand under her head. “Well, darlin’, I wish you luck—but don’t forget to lease one of those new apartments—quick.”

“I won’t,” he promised. And as he spoke, Miss Kinneally, somewhat perspicaciously, it seemed, rattled the doorknob audibly a moment, and then entered the room, blinking her eyes at the light.

“Well, that sleep made a new person out of me,” she said. “And I do hope that you two weren’t bored to death,” she added.

“Not at all,” the two younger occupants of the room both said in unison. At which she looked a bit startled. Halsey waved his fingertips at the girl in the bed. “Good night, Miss Kinneally,” he told the older woman. And he made his exit as quickly as possible, to try to begin to realize this strange new development in his life.

He went to his room, and undressing, automaton-like, turned back his bedclothes and got into his pajamas. But hardly had he buttoned the neck of those brightly striped garments halfway up, than his phone rang sharply. He sprang to it. Baxter, of course. No one else would ever be calling him at this hour. But Baxter it was not! It was his uncle, Roger Halsey.

“For Heaven’s sake, Carr,” the older man began, “I’ve tried a number of times to get you tonight. Where have you been?”

“Following up that Jap lead,” said the younger man cautiously.

“Anything—anything productive?” his uncle asked hastily.

“Nothing so far yet—with respect to our problem,” replied Halsey quite definitely. “What’s up—anything?”

“Yes. Bad news, Carr. A former janitor of mine here—his name is Olaf Jensen—has a son who’s a runner-boy down at the detective bureau. The boy, Jens Jensen, runs with messages and papers back and forth from one department to another, one floor to another. You know what a giant honeycomb the bureau is? Well, the boy was in Captain Duffy’s office tonight with a sheaf of papers—waiting for a signature or something—and caught part of a conversation between Duffy and another man—the man was undoubtedly Levenson, from the description given to me later—and, hearing my name, the boy listened as well as he could and got all he could. The minute he got off duty, he told his father. And his father came over to my place at once and handed it on to me. Carr, the bureau—Duffy himself—is all fixed to turn Hemingway over to Levenson and the Ajax outfit—and not us at all—the minute he’s found and they get done with him.”

“The devil you say? That’s bad. Baxter wasn’t sitting so solid down there as he thought.”

“No. But—wait—that isn’t all. They—Ajax—are playing every avenue now, with hard money, by which Hemingway may be turned up. Every newspaper tomorrow morning will have a paid advertisement in which they will come out flatfooted, offering $2000 this time for information which leads to the capture of Hemingway—after he is convicted of being the murderer. That’s Levenson’s cautious hand, see? The public now regards Hemingway conclusively as the Bush Bourse killer—and so Levenson hopes to make the public work just as hard—and yet perhaps not have to pay the reward money. He can’t bunk the police on that equivocation, however. The offer with them is cut and dried. Hemingway, killer or not. But wait, There’s more. Every city editor in town—yours, as well, Carr—has had a signed offer presented him of $2000 bonus money to split between himself and any of his reporters who locate Clifford Hemingway, providing the Ajax Company officials may see the man at the same time the reporters are getting Hemingway’s story. You know how it is—how newspapers, to scoop each other, often sequester their man a while when they locate him—and get his life history in the bargain. In the case of the Press—the offer is $2000 out-and-out bonus money for first interview by Ajax with Clifford Hemingway—available to reporters, sob sisters, and editors only. The actual cash, Carr, for all the rewards and bonuses, including some cash that is to go to Duffy, has been put in escrow with the Bernstein-Siegel Day and Night Bank in Old Loop, so that the signed offers won’t look like so much paper. The reason the boy was able to overhear all this was because Levenson was explaining to Duffy that none of these newspaper bonuses, or rewards, in any way nullified the secret arrangement with him, Duffy.”

“Jehosephat, Uncle. That Levenson is a swift operator, I’ll say. I’m damn sorry that Orski ever had his fool legs cut off. He’s an older man, and would probably have been much slower on the trigger himself.” Halsey was silent. “Well, all this is not so good, Uncle, I’ll admit. Looks now as though it’s you, and I, and Baxter—oh he’s with us, don’t worry—against all the city editors, the public, and the police department now, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does. And what a chance we’ve got!”

“Well, Uncle, I don’t know what I can do. It’s nearly three in the morning. Now if ever, damn it, I need that 90,000 bucks. And how I need it! Because I—but I won’t bother you with the reason why. All I can do now is to wait—on Baxter. He’s close to something—that may eventuate in something. Or which may give us a new lead or two. He’s to phone me immediately—if he gets a single millimeter closer to—to our objective.”

“Well all I can say is that if he can deliver the goods—to us, that is, not Ajax—I’ll insist on paying him $2000 bonus myself, out of my own killing on that Zell sale. Lord, Carr, with my 27 percent stock, I stand to pull down a terrific pot of money—more than I’ll ever be able to spend for the rest of my days. I—well—be sure and let Baxter know now, in case Levenson’s newspaper offer, and its cash backing, reaches his ears.”

“All right. I will. He could probably use $2000—to buy more pipes with.” Carr Halsey paused, undecidedly. “Well, as I say, he’s to phone me if he gets even within shouting distance of the information we need.”

“Very well, Carr,” the older man said wearily. “I’m worn out, though. I’m—I’m sick of it all.”

“Buck up. Everything comes to an end, one way or the other.”

And they said good-by.

“Damn the Ajax gang!” said Halsey morosely to himself, as he deposited the phone instrument back in its cradle. “Money certainly talks. Especially when it’s put right up in a day-and-night bank! And us—us!—the whole crowd of us—flatter than a pancake.”

He pondered a moment, troubledly, deeply, wondering where on earth in that great beehive, Federal headquarters, he could reach Baxter; and then he decided on the spot that Baxter was not one to doubledeal a friend, especially knowing the gravity of the situation. So he turned out the lights gloomily, and dropped into bed, unknowing that sooner than he thought he would have a chance of relaying his uncle’s undecisive offer on to Baxter himself. For hardly had he pulled the covers up over him, and his thoughts began to tear themselves bodily away from the never-ending exasperating problem threatening the only patrimony he might ever hope to own, to that pleasanter delightful new thing that had come into his life, that charming delicate girl who lay in the adjoining room and for whom he would like to have purchased $90,000 worth of silks, furs, gowns, motor cars and European trips, than a machine of some sort grated stridently against the curbing outside, an automobile door rattled open, and a few seconds later the doorbell of No. 810½ rang sharply. He was climbing out of bed even as it reverberated in his ears; but Miss Kinneally evidently heard it, for she was already answering it. He heard her ushering somebody—several persons, obviously—in, and even as he groped for his light switch, an authoritative knock sounded on the panels of his door. He gave up looking for the lights, and stumbled across the dark room, and, opening the door, peered out. Miss Kinneally had already gone back to her charge. There, under the lone night bulb of the front hall, stood two men, gleaming badges peeping from exposed vests, and one of them in a faultlessly cut suit holding in his hand a sealed envelope.

“Mr. Halsey,” he said, “Kenyon is my name. From Federal headquarters, downtown. Agent. This is Mr. Rice, also one of our agents. I have a note here from a friend of yours, Artemus Baxter, directing you to give over to us a bottle of some sort.”

“Come in, please.” Halsey let them in, found the lights at last, and flung a brown silk dressing gown loosely over himself. Cords of the dressing gown trailing loosely on the floor, he read the note completely, by the overhanging light. It was typewritten, but if he had had any idea or disquieting suspicions that it was a trick of some sort, he divested himself of such an idea immediately, for the phraseology was unmistakably Baxterian, and the handwriting in the signature the freakish chirography of Artemus Baxter himself, the ‘t’s looking exactly like ‘x’s, and the ‘e’s being Greek deltas so queerly made that they looked almost like the ‘t’s should have looked! The communication ran:

DEAR HALSE:

Give these two little lads the bottle of Mazoru-Ikeuna. Don’t bore them with any tales about it, as they’re just Uncle Sam’s errand boys for the moment. The secret is out at last. McCollum finally squawked, first in condensed synopsis form, and now he’s giving the fully embellished tale. We didn’t get even the preliminary synopsis, though, until he learned two things: that the Mazoru-Ikeuna was in existence, and could be gotten down here, and that a representative of the Hearst News Service would be present. That’s where we’re pulling a fast one on him, for Operator Joe Glozer is posing as the managing editor of the Herald-Examiner, our honorable Hearst newspaper here—you know Glozer used to work as a leg-man for the Herald-Ex, and has his original Herald-Ex identification folder. The lad’s an actor, too, no foolin’. And the real managing ed, Charles S. Stanton, will be red-headed if it ever gets to his ears, God bress de-kin’ gemmun! The Jap’s in another room and, I understand, hearing that McCollum is doing the Grand Sing, has announced his willingness to do the same—and, in fact, is clamoring for a megaphone and a place in line in front of our one very busy steno. I’m sorry to say, however, that I’ve nothing so far to send you on your Hemingway problem. I am right on the inside of everything down here—and I’m telling you there are durn few who are on the inside, too!—but, howin’ell could I help but be, considering that I was in on that grand finalé tonight, and that I know Inspector-General Oliver Hagman, who’s conducting this investigation, like I know my own brother, if I had one! Well, I’ll be over to your diggings when it’s all complete—probably some time in the morning, I judge—and give you the whole story, as much as there is. Wait for me, without fail. Just now I’ve got to see the whole thing out—but it looks, Halse, as though hardly a part of the whole thing can ever see print. Gosh, ain’t ’at fierce?

Artemus Baxter.

P. S.: By the way, before my particular section of the Federal Express pulled away from the Keegan farm tonight—you were already heading then, you know, for Central Air Field in the gyro, with the sky-jumping bunch—I stepped into McCollum’s radio chamber and just plucked off that highly-colored chart that was pinned to his television screen. When we reached the Federal Building, I sort of had a hunch that this story might, for Mr. Artemus Baxter, turn into one of those gentlemanly forcible detention affairs like the Saigen counterfeiting case in which it was ‘Oh, Mr. Baxter, you must stay a while—don’t bother to meet your deadline tomorrow morning!’ In fact, it looked to me as though I had a tutelary guardian at my elbow right then. Well, I had a stamped envelope in my pocket, and while my guardian stuck close, I just stepped into the letter registering room on the main floor—the Post Office part of the building—folded the chart in several directions, sealed it up in the envelope with red wax, addressed it to you, and dropped it in the collection window in the middle foyer. I had a sort of hunch that that was the only way I could ever insure having it, so as to run it on our color-page 3 of the Sun—that is, if it could be reproduced at all by the three-screen 60-line Ben Day process. Then we went on upstairs to the Federal Bureau. Now, however, Halse, it looks as though the whole story is Federal sacred-cow. You’ll get that letter, however, in the morning, and I suggest, for the time being, that you leave it unopened with the midnight postmark on it so we’ll have some sort of record or proof that it’s been safe and secluded from vulgar gaze all the while. I’ll explain later.

P. P. S.: By the way, the Jap seems to be entirely in the clear so far as any complicity in that Proctor murder goes. Claims to be able to prove by several people, including the proprietress herself, that he was in Mrs. Tuchawara’s Japanese tea-shop on Blue Island Avenue near Halsted last Wednesday from half-past two to half-past three. But what is most important, none of the prints from his saffron fingers tally in any way with those on the pestle handle, for Inspector General Hagman has sent over to the Municipal Crime Lab for an enlarged set of the prints in the Proctor murder. The Jap, my boy, is out! Wasn’t even an accomplice to it, evidently.

P. P. P. S.: Who did kill Proctor then, you ask? Well, sez I, McCollum indubitably and unquestionably done the dirty deed, judging from the facts we already know. For his finger prints tally exactly with one of the two sets on the handle. But the Mexican-German swine says, however, that he will prove in a very unusual manner, and before morning, at that, that he did not bump Proctor off and could not have done so. I’m a bit skeptical myself. But he seems quite cocky on that score. I believe his proof will be a dud. He’s standing on a bluff—that’s what I think. Well, we’ll know more later on that, too.

P. P. P. P. S.: Good night. Get some sleep.

A. B.

Halsey finished the reading of the note. “All right, gentlemen,” he said, folding it up and tucking it safely away in the capacious pocket of the silk dressing gown. “If you’ll just wait one second till I dash off a line in answer to Mr. Baxter—and then a further moment—I’ll get the thing you’re sent for.”

He motioned them to chairs.

Standing at his desk, he wrote simply on a piece of paper:

Thanks, Artemus. In case you pick up any sort of a lead whatever to H, and incidentally hear anything about loose money floating around in the newspaper offices on the matter of Ajax getting to him first, Uncle says for me to tell you that he covers all bets, dollar for dollar.

Halse.

He sealed his brief communication in an envelope, wrote Baxter’s name on it, and handed it to the man who called himself Kenyon. Then, rescuing his keys from his clothing, he went down the dark basement stairs. He snapped on the single dusty bulb in the storeroom corridor, unlocked his own particular cubicle and again, as three times before, crawled over his trunk to the black corner where rested the big bottle of blue liquid which had been used as a model for that almost perfect replica for the suave and urbane Mr. Sumiko. He brought it upstairs and into the room. The two Federal operatives, glancing at it, although none too understandingly, that much was certain, nodded and rose. And with a curt though friendly good night, they withdrew. Halsey heard them greet the operative Sanders when they were halfway down the steps, heard a mere brief word or two passed on both sides, and then the purr of their engine as their car drew away into the night. With which, more than curious, he put out his lights and repaired back to bed again for the second time. For a little while he thought of Baxter’s cryptic note—then, as before, his thoughts flew back again to that delightful spirit in the next room; of a sudden he became conscious that he was dog-tired, physically exhausted; and then everything melted, faded away, seemingly, into a dream—a dream which seemed startlingly real—a dream in which he was rescuing a beautiful girl who was being tied to a balloon by a Chinaman with a purple mustache and a square-cut brown goatee. And the girl was Loris Hemingway!

But he had gone to sleep—and had slept a considerable number of hours before that dream had registered itself on his consciousness—for the dream was the one which is always retained by a sleeper on sharp unexpected awaking. Indeed, the bright sunlight was pouring into his room when he opened his eyes. The clock on the mantel was sonorously striking the hour of 8. And a timid knock was sounding on his door. He rose, rubbing one eye, stifling a yawn at the same time, and went to it. Chloe, her black face shining, her lace apron stiffly starched, stood there, two letters and a square wrapped package in her dusky hands.

“Oh—’scuse me, Mist’ Halsah. Didn’t know you wuz asleep yit. It’s des de mail—one passol post an’ two lettahs.”

“Thanks, Chloe.” He took them. “Say, Chloe—is Mrs. Morely mad—at me?”

“Am she—mad at you?” the girl echoed wide-eyed. She even took on a scared appearance herself. “Um, am she mad!” She lowered her voice appreciably. “She say you de mos’ immohal man she evah huhd of—enticin’ young gals into dis yeah place and a-payin’ of dey rents, dey all innocent an’—an’ lamblike—an’—an’ not knowin’ nothin’ ’bout it. She say you is a monstah of in—in—inikwitah, she call it—dat you is a loose man—dat you is a liah—dat you is a—a pillah o’ co’ruption—dat you is a demon o’ wileness—an’ she say I is to tell you dat—”

“Yes,” he said faintly, “tell her I’ll vacate tonight, at six o’clock, when my week is up. Oh baby!” he added—and Chloe, raised her black brows flirtatiously. “But I’ll have to grab that apartment quick.” And he closed the door gently into Chloe’s bewildered black face.

He sighed deeply, and raised the shade to its fullest extent. He washed his face with a vigorous circular swoop of his wash-cloth, as he had done when a small boy; and combed his hair in two vicious strokes, one left, one right. Then, in dressing gown again, he sat down in the rocking chair adjoining that big window to look at his mail.

The first letter was the selfsame one Baxter had said he had addressed around midnight: the brown Post Office sealing wax on its back, and the characteristic handwriting on its front proved that. He followed the other’s request and put it to one side. The next letter bore the corner-card of the New Publishing Company, from whom he had unsuccessfully tried the day before to obtain a copy of their own book, My Memories of the Liao Keng Ru. Puzzled, he opened it and glanced at its signature. It was that of the taciturn and monosyllabic Mr. New himself. He went hastily over its multi-paragraphed phraseology. It ran:

Dear Mr. Halsey:

We regret deeply that we were unable to furnish you today with a book which had been on our own publishing list.

On learning, however, that you were vitally interested in the subject of which it treated, we had our assistant canvass several of the secondhand bookstores and book-jobbers about town with whom we occasionally do business.

By phone, of course.

And with respect only to literature pertaining to Japanese matters, and things of that nature.

We located something for you.

At the Economy Bookstore, largest purchasers of private libraries and publishers’ remainder stocks in the city.

Its title is THINGS JAPANESE.

It is by a missionary who lived there 30 years.

It contains two pages, they tell us by phone, on the subject “Liao Keng Ru.”

We have asked them to mail it to you at once.

And to charge same to our account.

We trust our Negro boy, February, got your address correctly.

Very Sincerely, believe us to be,

THE NEW PUBLISHING COMPANY

per

Ross K. New

(Read after being dictated)

Postscriptal: Don’t mention it.

Halsey smiled. The letter was typically Mr. Newish, as he could see from having even once talked with the brief-spoken publisher who held forth in Buzzard’s Roost on the other side of Old Loop.

“A darned good fellow at that, that conservationist in the art of speaking,” he commented to himself. “To turn around and dig up the whole town for me this way.”

He opened the bulky square package. It was as Mr. New had described. A fairly thick book, and bound in funereal black. Second-hand, quite obviously, if not third or fourth-hand in the bargain, for it was in bad condition. In fact, when he riffled over its pages, he saw that scores of its leaves were in readiness to fall out, if not actually falling out. A square-bearded old gentleman with a reversed ecclesiastical collar, and tiny gold-rimmed spectacles, occupied the highly glazed frontispiece. The book, Halsey saw, had been published a full 12 years ago, in 1930. The author—he of the ecclesiastic collar—was one, Mr. D. Dottison Dalrymple, D. D., and the explanatory caption under the main title on the title page proclaimed that he had indeed lived in Japan for 30 years.

Halsey leafed idly over the book. It was, beyond doubt, a tremendous collation of intimate and utterly miscellaneous things concerning the Islands of Nippon and the Japanese people that could have been collected only by some kind of anthropological and consuetudinary Boswell who might have observed and punctiliously annotated for many decades. Its articles, some indexed under strange-sounding Japanese headings and some under English ones, and all of which headings were in alphabetical order, ranged from a few lines in length to several full pages; and in the brief few minutes in which he leafed forward, and backward, and took occasional dives into unopened sections of the book, he learned such odd and disassociated facts as that chess in Japan was entirely different from chess as played elsewhere in the world, and was called both Shogi and Shogo; that the Japanese musical scale had only 5 notes for the simple reason that when music had been evolved in Nippon there were then but 5 recognized planets, 5 elements and 5 viscera; and that the cats of Japan had tails so short that they were virtually tailless. He learned in short order that the wives of the Ainos, or hairy men living in the northern island of Yezo, all had tattooed mustaches on their upper lips, and that the Shichi Fukujin were the 7 Gods of Japanese Luck, on seeing which he profoundly wished that he himself could call right now on the Shichi for help. He acquired the more or less useless information that there was in Japan only, a pheasant cock with tail feathers 18 feet long, who was never allowed to get off his perch for fear of breaking his appendage, and that the Soraben, or Japanese abacus board, was so much in use that the average Japanese child could not add 5 to 7 in his head, nor do any other kind of mental arithmetic. Japanese customs, he saw in a long 2-page article headed TOPSY-TURVINESS OF JAPANESE LIFE, were upside-down and inside-out as well, for at a dinner the sweets came at the beginning; a guest, leaving an inn, tipped the proprietor instead of the waiter; a Jap carpenter always constructed the roof of a house first, breaking it apart and numbering the sections, to be put on later; and in a tradesman’s bill or business statement the figures were invariably set forth first, with the items corresponding to each figure placed to the right and constituting the extension thereof! He saw, also, a Bukki-Ryo, or completely worked-out table of mourning for every known form of human relationship, showing the number of days on which the usual white mourning clothing must be worn, and the number of days from which the bereaved one must abstain from animal food. Misasagi, he found, without even reading the one-page article, were Japanese mound tombs, and following that mortuary information he came upon some that was more cheerful, gastronomically, at least, to the effect that in Japan birthdays were always celebrated by eating rice with red beans in it, and that, moreover, so far as birthdays went, all little girls in the Empire celebrated theirs on March 3rd, and all little boys on May 5th. There were two pages on the Cha-no-yu, or tea ceremonies, which he did not even glance at, and three on the multifold uses in Japan of bamboo, which he also jumped blithely over. Hana-garuta, he found, were the auction-bridge weapons of Japan, consisting of playing cards of which each carried a flower, 48 to the deck, and containing one particular set or suite carrying a butterfly or bird additional to its flower, and another suite having a line of poetry added to both its botanic and zoological symbols. He learned, with some interest, that a certain highly intellectual game existed in Japan—nasally intellectual, that is—called Kiki-ko, or incense sniffing, in which the players sat about an urn in which various combinations of 5 standard incenses were burned, and had to guess which incenses provided each composite smell—up to the point, that is, where their noses got so dulled that they had to sniff from vinegar flagons to get their olfactory senses back!

He came by accident, more than purpose, on the subject “Liao Keng Ru” upon which now, of course, he was no longer interested, and, as it happened, the subject was not treated as it would have had to be had he still been interested in it, for the entry concerning it was really LIAO KENG RU (DAY), and it went into elaborate details of the feasts and parades, and the family festivals staged chiefly by the older folks in Japan in celebrating the particular day set aside under this name for commemorating Nippon’s acquisition of that river in its entirety, and the turning of the tide of the whole Russo-Japanese War. He ran over it but sketchily, and turned on. He was now among the subjects which, whether indexed by their Japanese names or by their nearest English equivalents, began with the letter “M.” And then, and not until then, did a highly coruscating idea strike him amidships.

“Why,” he ejaculated, “there may even be an entry here on Mazoru-Ikeuna. I’ll—”

He turned over, and on a page entirely loose and quite ready to fall out he found exactly that upon whose existence he had just been hypothesizing. A brief paragraph. That was all. Sixteen lines—no more. He read it frowningly, then stared oft into space.

“Hm!” was all he said. “Interesting, yes—but illuminative, not at all. Certainly not, so far as all this slugging and slaying goes. The stuff then, obviously wasn’t Mazoru after all. Although if it was—if it was—what the devil could a berry ju—” He stopped, and gazed out of the window.

For Artemus Baxter, his eyes looking a bit tired, his face a bit drawn, his left wrist bandaged snugly with white cloth, was dismounting from a taxi out in front of the house.

Halsey rose hastily, put the loose page he had just been reading, together with the sealed letter, in the breast pocket of his coat hanging across a near-by chair, and hurried to let the other in.

Baxter entered the room, and dropped wearily into the Morris chair he had occupied last night. “Well, Halse,” he said, “I see you’ve had a few winks. Me—I’ve been sitting around all night, right on the inside of things, with eyes open, ears open, and tongue hanging out as well, getting what’s the biggest story of the year, in my opinion. But thanks to the fact that it involves our Mazoru-Ikeuna—well—the story is not to be printed, Halse. Fact! Orders from the Right Honorable President of these United States, Allan P. Sayres himself!”

“The devil you say!” Halsey dragged a chair over close to the Morris chair from which Baxter, as usual, was stretching his long legs forth. He regarded the older man gravely. The veteran journalist seemed a different individual, somehow, this morning. Gone was that facetiousness which almost constantly characterized him, and which Halsey always knew was a cloak to hide some inner concealed self of the man. He looked, this morning, like one who had surveyed a vast field of human activity—who had glimpsed things that might have been, but never were. Halsey spoke. “So it can’t be printed, eh? Well your note suggested that last night.” He paused. “Well, Artemus, I’m on the same paper with you, I believe—and only a poor free-lance sportswriter as well—so I’m not likely to be writing it up as news. So don’t forget—me! I’ve heard nothing—and I’m eaten alive with curiosity.” He paused. “And how’s the wrist this morning?”

Baxter laughed contentedly. He pulled a big black cigar from his vest pocket and lighted it with his good hand. “Little stiff today. Specially after hammering you off that typewritten letter last night. Doctor at the Federal Bureau looked it over—but it’s nothing serious. Miguel’s bullet—yes, it was his—only cut into the surface flesh, across the bone and stunned it more than anything. That’s all the extent of the damage.” He settled back in the chair and scowled deeply now. “And say—am I sore—at you!”

“At me? Why? My landlady’s putting me out tonight. For an infraction of the—er—rules. And now you’re sore. Why?”

“Getting put out of your quarters, are you?” Baxter gazed about him, appraisingly. “Well, changing about a little will do you good. And I can apply for your room. I’m tired of my own.” He glanced humorously at Halsey. “Why I’m sore, Halse, is because of that confounded monetary assurance you stuck in that note last night. Did you think for a minute that if I got any kind of a lead on Hemingway, I would have let the Ajax crowd jump in on him ahead of you?”

“Well, there was money flying around—”

“In the city rooms. Yes. I know it. I called up our own last night and heard all about it. Money? Hell with money. I’ve got plenty of it!” Baxter fumbled in his outer breast pocket, and withdrew a crisp $100 bill. “Here’s a cold hundred. Except—er—that it’s an extremely nice phoney—only case on record where anybody has ever been so coo-coo as to attempt a bill as big as a century note. A product of the Jim Dilley gang. Sure, Inspector Hagman at Fed Headquarters loaned it to me before I left this morning so that I could have a halftone picture of it made for the paper. Sort of a joke phoney, it is. Good only for high-pressure, rapid-action passing, as at a racetrack or something, for the indefatigable Dilley who made it couldn’t achieve a good etching of Benjamin Franklin which belongs on all century notes, and accomplished instead one of Salmon P. Chase, who rightfully belongs on the $10,000 bills. A wag, as well as an artist, the Dilley; they caught him in Morocco night before last surrounded by a whole harem of Arabian beauties; and I hope to interview him when they fetch him back across. Well, that little story—and the loan of Exhibit C here—is my consolation prize—all I get out of last night’s hubbub.” He tucked the crisp counterfeit back in his pocket. “Halse, Halse, yo’ shore done me wrong last night. If I’d have gotten anything whatever that would have put me on Hemingway’s tail this morning, either on Chicago’s North Side, West Side or South Side, rest assured that you’d have been the first to—”

“Then—” Halsey’s face fell, “—then there’s nothing whatsoever doing on that?”

Baxter shook his head. “No. Such information as McCollum has been able to render is of no utility at all for clamping down on our man today. He knows a bit more than the readers of the newspapers know. For, returning to that laboratory after a rather violent physical altercation with Proctor, he has seen the message on the floor of the laboratory. That message will give your hopes a bit of a jolt, I fear. Except that it at least leaves you all—you and Ajax—still 50-50 in the race—50-50 as to winning out. Besides which, it wasn’t completed. Which latter fact is acceptable enough considering the way Proctor was already wallowing in his own gore when he started to write it —only to flicker out. Proctor did well enough to write down as much as he did, I’m thinking. He disposed of a very vital matter that was troubling him, gave all the information he could, and then tried to go on to further things—but died. I’m going to come to all that, however, in turn. So do be patient. For I’m trying in the meanwhile to work a small angle of that message before it’s officially released to the newspapers. Which it has not been yet. The angle that I’m working—and it’s being done right this minute for me, Halse, by Hagman himself, may produce something, and—confound it!—may blow up. I’m to learn the final outcome of my experiment right here in this room—and on yon telephone. So let’s save a lot of utterly useless speculations and utterly useless words until the election returns are all in. What say? Enough to assure you that the message, as written, leaves you and your uncle, and Ajax, all sitting just where you all sat last night. And it—but say, how about this girl in the back room?—you got anything?—of interest?”

Although consumed now with continually growing curiosity Halsey saw plainly that this was one instance where the newspaperman wished to follow up some peculiar clue, inaugurate some odd quest, or execute some bizarre experiment, entirely by himself, or at least to have it done for him while he sat here; and so, assured at least that the race for one Clifford X. Hemingway still ran neck and neck, Halsey relinquished any further quizzing of the other along the line of Proctor’s dying message, and instead made the swiftest and most complete condensation of facts he had ever attempted in his life, which facts were the ones the girl had given him in the early hours of the morning. Baxter nodded, several times, as though struck by the exactness with which some fact fitted perfectly with others in his own possession. None, however, apparently affected his experiment, or whatever it was, for he made no effort to go to Halsey’s phone and call up the Federal chief, Hagman. When the younger man had finished, Baxter spoke.

“Well, that certainly supplies practically all the missing parts in the whole picture puzzle. She, McCollum, and the Jap have put things just about exactly together. The dead man Proctor is the one who could complete it. I’d have been loping down here to get her story long ago—except that it was thumbs down from Washington, even before dawn, on the whole thing,”

He sighed deeply, as a badly frustrated journalist.

“And now you want to know a lot of things, don’t you, Halse? Things about your Mazoru-Ikeuna, and your various visitors of the last few days. Well, you shall have them. Question is—whose story do you want to hear first? The Jap’s? Or, McCollum’s—who is, of course, August Frantzius; and I’ll call him that from now on. He squawked a-plenty—after we pulled that fast one on him—told him we’d show him the bottle of Mazoru-Ikeuna, and that a Hearst News Service man would sit in. Now Washington has pulled a fast one on him. That is maybe—and maybe not, at that! It all depends on whether certain secret despatches go hither and yon, over the Atlantic cables. But whether or not, the story’s suppressed! And he’s interned—incommunicado—and will be kept so until the Revolution down there in Mexico is squelched. Or over. After which he gets a 3-year stretch, from which the period of his present internment will be subtracted, under Federal Criminal Statute Number 10,872, created by Congress in 1940 to back up Article 52 of the Geneva Conference of 1939. After which again, if all witnesses are still then living, he goes on trial—should the State of Illinois so desire!—for any minor infractions of the local criminal code—like, for instance, killin’s, or what have you. The mahogany-bellied rotter, in his squawk, literally sold the Indian up the river—and Poor Lo, Ph.D., at Nippiginic River, will catch internment himself—at least a year—for Laurens, the Canadian Prime Minister, has already been communicated with. Fortunately for the Injun, the Canadian criminal statute which backs up Article 52 isn’t quite so severe as our own. The Jap? Well, he squawkled so freely and plentifully that it appears he catches internment only—but incommunicado, also—for the rest of the duration of the Mex Revolution, and then gets booted out of the U.S.A.”

Baxter paused for breath.

“As to how long that Mex Revolution will go on, Halse, and Frantzius and the Jap be held incommunicado, I regret to say now that it will probably be one hell of a long, long time. Because—well, that’s what I’m going to explain. At least you and I will always have the satisfaction of knowing that we, and we alone, kept it from continuing as a bloody affair, with 200,000 Miguels and Juans and Ramons and Estavans bumped off—both sides. Darn my soul, Halse, if I don’t believe that Frantzius, after knocking down pretty girls on Tower Court, and pulling off all sorts of high-handed high-jinkses in Bush Bourse chemical labs, as well, hasn’t come off pretty much winner at that, certainly so far as the fortunes of his brother ‘Bloody Juan’ go!” Baxter was regretfully silent a few seconds. Then he sighed resignedly. “And—oh yes—the Mexican-Teuton intelligence chief also catches a little fine of $10,000—that’s 20,000 pesos anyway—and may now read either Goethe or radio-technology in a cell in an utterly sequestered Federal pen for a confoundedly long while. He—what’s that? That old German war stuff he pulled years ago? Well, it seems that it’s outlawed. Which outlawry, however, was used partly as a bargaining lever to open Frantzius’ mouth early this morning.” Baxter paused. “Now I think this disposes of the fates of all these multi-hued gents, brown, red and yaller. So now, Halse—which man’s story will you have?”

“Well—the Jap’s, I guess. Sumiko, as he called himself. Or Kogo, as that murderous villain called him last night when he was trying to pot us under that garage floor. Who is that bird, Artemus?”

“Kogo Hayashi is his name,” Baxter said. “Former aide—also, I guess, valet, cigar lighter, errand boy and general bottle-washer!—for Prince Ido, Japanese Minister of War some years back, now retired and growing Japanese green tea on his plantation on the tableland of Makinohara, in Shizuoka, on the Oi River. Kogo, however, unlike his fond superior, hasn’t been growing green tea! He’s been serving five years in the Japanese military prison on the island of Nakanoshima—and he just hit America about six or seven weeks ago.”

“Served five years—in a Japanese prison?” the younger man repeated. “That accounts then for his sunken eyes and stooped back. They must give ’em real punishment over there?”

“They do. But military prisoners, like all others, get time off for good behavior—to be exact, the birthdays of all the Emperors to ’way back when! Which, in Kogo’s case, amounted to some 77 days.”

“Well—time off or not—what the devil is this Kogo doing out on Keeg—well, go ahead, Artemus, your own way. I see I’m only delaying your explanation.”

“Yes,” agreed Baxter, looking meaningfully at his watch. “You are. Also Time flies. At a certain hour this morning, very shortly hence, the sparse information is to be released to the Press that a man picked up in a Federal case and held incommunicado—no details will be given, Halse—has revealed the obliterated part of so much of the message as was written on the laboratory floor in the Bush Bourse killing. Thus will the Press obtain at last the presumable motive for that killing. I want to be at the Sun, if possible, when the bulletin comes in, so I can stop their yapping for the full Federal story by assuring ’em that I myself saw the telegram from the President of the U.S.A. saying ‘No!’ I’m to catch a call here on your toot-a-toot-toot phone about twenty minutes before the info is released, so that I can hie for my treadmill. So I’ll get going with my tale. And I’ll begin with your Jap. Thus reaching your bottle of Mazoru-Ikeuna! And a number of other things. But in order to go ahead, Halse, I must first, I guess, go back to the year 1937, when Yasuri, the Mad Emperor of Japan, sat on Nippon’s throne. For the story you are about to hear now—and which, as I told you, can never officially see print—is how Yasuri came within the fraction of an inch of upsetting the peace and stability of the entire world—of breaking for all time to come the backbone of the British Lion himself—and of redistributing the yellow population of the globe in a way that but few people living today can dream.”

“I’m waiting,” said Halsey quietly. “And in addition to what Mr. Yasuri did, I’m expecting to hear, also, how McCollum happened to kill Proctor—and why.”

But to this last statement Baxter rendered only an enigmatic, if not downright funereal, smile.